


One Curse Tablet, Slightly Used

by Selden



Category: Historical RPF
Genre: Curses, F/F, Treat, mentions of classism and slavery, of dubious historicity, unfortunate coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-27 05:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16212095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: I present Sappho of the honey mouth to you, Persephone, goddess of dead things.May she feel no love in her heart or pleasure in her bed unless she return to me.May you bind her head to my head, her thighs to my thighs, her lips to my lips.And may this curse tablet fucking work already, goddess.May she come back.





	One Curse Tablet, Slightly Used

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alexandria (heartfullofelves)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartfullofelves/gifts).



> We know that Sappho spent part of her life, sometime between 604 and 595 BC, in exile from her home city of Myteline and the island of Lesbos. We also know that around 590 BCE, the ruling families of Myteline lost control of the city and were forced to flee. It is likely that Sappho and her relatives were among them. It was a war-hero called Pittacus who came out on top back in Myteline, with the support of the Penthilidae, themselves once the city's ruling house. He is in fact remembered as a popular, successful, and relatively enlightened ruler – not that this is likely to have endeared him to the exiled aristocrats. The fragment below (in Anne Carson’s translation) is likely Sappho’s response to a ‘Mika’ who has chosen to side with the winning faction:
> 
> ]you Mika  
> ]but I will not allow you  
> ]you chose the love of the Penthelids  
> ]evilturning  
> ]some sweet song  
> ]in honey voice  
> ]piercing breezes  
> ]wet with dew

The exact words of this curse tablet have been lost.

Some five or ten or twenty years after it was written, this tablet was dug up and placed on a fire built out of dry pine and ilex branches. It was early evening. The two old women who had dug it up held hands and watched the smoke come up, thin and quite steady into the darkening sky. The tablet, made of lead, buckled and bled thick silver, melting into slag.

One of the women leant in close, and whispered in the other's ear.

"It was Gello, in the forest, long ago, my love, who first taught me the value of a curse. Of words which burn, and change, and flirt, and _turn_." She smiled. "I'm glad you learned. It took you long enough."  
  
The women kissed, holding each other close, biting each other’s lips as if they chased the taste of something sweet. And then they walked away, together, holding hands.  
  
\--  
  
I present Sappho of the honey mouth to you, Persephone, goddess of dead things. I present her bright eyes and her long hair and her soft thighs. I present her quick-stepping feet and her beautiful breasts. I present her lovely arse and her belly and the hot kind place between her thighs.  
  
I deposit these things with you, Persephone, and with the Earth. Just as the woman in this grave has no power in her hands, feet, or body – no power to move or to give or to love – so may Sappho feel no love of her heart or pleasure in her bed unless she return to me, Mika, to whom Thulakis gave birth. May she come back.  
  
May you bind her head to my head, her thighs to my thighs, her lips to my lips.  
  
May she come back.  
  
_Take and change her, Mother of dark and cold and_  
_under places. Trouble and turn her back to_  
_harbour, tease her, tenderly make her hear me,_  
_touch me, taste me, quickly return to me and_  
_our lovely mornings._  
  
Root of darkness, dead snakes and stinging women, I present her before you. I give you this piece of lead, which was hard enough to write on, oh terrible dead things. My fingers hurt. But I won’t put that down – please disregard it, oh snapping triple-headed monster dogs. Oh, Lady of the grave. Oh, Gello of the many faces. Here, have some magic words from Egypt to chew on –  
  
 MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN.  
  
Yeah, that’s the stuff. I had to bribe a slave girl all the way from Naucratis. I had to bribe the gravedigger, as well. Just to sit here beside an open grave, corpse-flavoured dust getting inside my sandals, scratching my heart into a scrap of lead.

(The slave girl, she said it works better if you bury it. It is so dull and heavy in my hands, and cold.)  
  
She always wrote so easily, you see. Her stylus shivered wax and pottery sherds and papyrus into soft flesh, into a hot wet mess of alphabet.  
  
Dead things, may you bind her pen to my pen. Her clever ink to my slow silver-scratching words.

May she come back.  
  
May she remember how we played together as children, running through the dark pine woods behind the women’s quarters of my father’s house. May she remember how the light came through the pine branches in dusty lines. May she remember how the sap came bulging from the trees in golden beads, and how we licked at it and spat, and how the wild strong taste stayed in our throats.

May she remember how the monster Gello stalked us through the trees, near nightfall, when we should have been in bed. May she remember how she said it was the wind, or maybe not, and how a tall dark changing shape bulged between the trees, like sap or shadows in the summer night.  
  
We held hands, then, and ran back home. We came to my house first, and I climbed in. She was so brave.  
  
She went on back alone, to her own house.  
  
I waited, heartsick, all that night, watching the mask of Gorgo on the nursery wall, lit sideways by the moon. I thought she’d surely been eaten to pieces as she ran back home.  
  
But she came back the next day, good as new, smiling behind her mother’s skirts. We wove together on my little loom. Sparrows made a wild squabble in the dusty yard.  
  
“Did you see Gello, going home last night?” I asked her, leaning close.  
  
She smiled. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps she spoke to me, and told me things.”  
  
I saw her then, for the first time, as terrible.  
  
The sun came down and tangled in her hair.  
  
May she come back.  
  
May she remember how we kissed – my first – in the deep shadow of a storeroom, filled with tall fat jars of unmixed wine. May she remember that deep heady smell, and how it got into our blood, under our skin. How close we held each other, in the dark. How young we were.  
  
_Kissing, eager, laughing and telling stories,_  
_naked, lying, sun high above us sharp as_  
_lemon. Roses heavy as lead or clouds or_  
_lies or loving, clover and violet, those_  
_thunderous flowers._  
  
You hear that, dead Lady? Gello? You monsters?

Once, she hung roses all around my neck.  
  
May she remember how they smelled. My sweat. May she get wet as morning grass, oh goddess of Earth. MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN, and so forth.  
  
May she come back.  
  
May she remember how she sang – down at my feet, leading a dance, leaning above me, smiling, at a wedding. May she remember how we kissed, that night, and more, moving together on soft sheets, within an inner room. She wore fine purple Lydian cloth, she kissed and sucked and left dark marks. Her brothers and the other men laughed in their drink outside. She licked the insides of my thighs. She took my headband off.  
  
May she remember how she sang, leading the women down towards the harbour. How the sun shone high above us and the sea shone out below us, how the rocks were white as children's teeth, and the air smelled of hot salt, and sea, and thyme. How I clapped time behind her, and sang too. How it was her song that we sang, together, fast and sweet.

May she remember how she cried, when Atthis left her for Andromeda. May she remember how I cried, for sweet Erinna of the curling hair. May she remember how I helped her curse, and she helped me, and how we both got drunk, and tumbled into bed, and called each other by their names. She said the right name - my name - first. May she remember _that_ , goddess of Earth.  
  
May she remember how, when I had my own household, so did she. How we came to each other, and ate honey-cakes, and laughed, and kissed, and had the slaves bring out the fine bronze cups for us to use. How long the afternoons seemed then. How rich the wine.  
  
_Greedy, grasping backwards for pleasures, I am_  
_altogether your creature, your secret, the_  
_word once softly breathed on my neck, the warm nape._  
_Sing me, make me, talk as you used to. Love and_  
_Possess me. Now, come –_  
  
MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN. MAEI OTE etc etc.

My knees ache, now, from crouching in the dirt. This spell - this spell had better fucking work.  
  
May she come back.  
  
May she remember how she kissed other girls, and sang - sang to her daughter as she held my hand. Brave little Kleis, named for her grandmother. She had her mother's hair. I told them once, it caught the sun just like a pine-torch, sweet-smelling. Burning red-gold after dark.  
  
May she come back.  
  
May she remember how the streets got clabbered up with shouting and with ugly smoke. May she remember how the common people surged and yelled, and trod the ordinary daylight underfoot, like slops, or old fish scales. How our city grew strange and swelled with rage. How her fine brother, smooth-speaker, cupbearer, stumbled and fled and dropped his fancy sword.  
  
May she remember what it was we had to fear. May she remember that prudence has its own rewards, that Gello waits out prowling in the dark. May she remember how monsters can change their shape, and seem one day like slaves and common people shouting in the streets. May she remember just how wise it is to recognise which man has won the day. There was no need for her household, or her family, to lose their place. Our new ruler is a most generous man. And prudent, too.

You think I'm lying, don't you? But it's true.

There was no need for her to say the things she did to me.  
  
May she feel loss move underneath her skin like sap.  
  
Like fire.  
  
Oh, MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN.  
  
I should have bought some other magic words.

Gello, you change your shape. Let her change too.  
  
May she come back.  
  
Oh, may she come back. Persephone, please understand my words. Draw her back by her heart and soul to Mika, to whom Thulakis gave birth. Bind the soul and the heart of Sappho, to whom Kleis gave birth. Bind her to me, although she sleeps and walks and sings across the sea.  
  
May she come back.  
  
MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN.  
  
I don’t care now that I was right and she was wrong.  
  
And may these words never be undone, unless we come together to this place and take out this piece of lead and destroy it with our own hands. Unless she has returned to Lesbos and to me and to my bed and my heart.  
  
May she come back. May she come back and - MAEI OTE ELBOSATOK ALAOUBETO OEIO AEN.  
  
_Now, come -_

**Author's Note:**

> The magical formula in this fic (and some more general elements) is taken from a papyrus attraction curse from second century Egypt, in which one Heraeis sought to gain the 'soul and heart' of Sarapias. It seemed appropriate, because both Heraeis and Sarapias were women - but, obviously, it is nothing if not ahistorical in the extreme (even the use of lead is a stretch). The protag here is just ahead of her time, I guess.


End file.
